FDR - Jean Edward Smith [342]
FDR was initially reluctant. He wished to meet Churchill, but not until the dust from Pearl Harbor had settled. “I would like to suggest delay … until early stages of mobilization complete here and situation in Pacific more clarified,” the president wrote on December 10. “My first impression is that full discussion would be more useful a few weeks hence than immediately.”8 Evidently Roosevelt spoke directly with Churchill later that day and expressed concern for the prime minister’s safety on the long ocean voyage, especially the return trip after his presence in the United States had become known.
Churchill refused to be deterred. “We do not think there is any serious danger about return journey,” he replied. “There is however, great danger in our not having a full discussion on the highest level about the extreme gravity of the naval position as well as upon all the production and allocation issues involved.… I never felt so sure about the final victory, but only concerted action will achieve it.”9
Roosevelt conceded. “Delighted to have you here at White House,” he cabled the evening of December 10. “The news is bad but it will be better.”10
Three days later Churchill sailed from Scotland on the shakedown cruise of the new battleship Duke of York (a sister ship to Prince of Wales), accompanied by his military chiefs and Lord Beaverbrook, Britain’s Canadian-born minister of supply. It was a stormy crossing with gale force winds and forty-foot waves, and the second day out the great battleship shed its destroyer escort, relying on its 28-knot speed to elude German U-boats. Once again Britain’s entire war leadership was making the perilous passage across the Atlantic on a single ship in a hostile sea. Churchill had originally planned to sail up the Chesapeake to the Potomac and then motor to Washington, but the rough weather delayed his arrival. When Duke of York reached Hampton Roads on December 22, the prime minister disembarked and boarded a U.S. Navy Lockheed Lodestar, which landed in Washington forty-five minutes later. “On no account come out to meet me,” he advised FDR, but when the plane landed Roosevelt stood waiting, his back propped against a White House limousine.
Churchill hit the White House like a cyclone. Eleanor had arranged for his personal staff to be housed there and had cleared the Monroe Room on the second floor for the prime minister’s “map room,” modeled on his London command post. Churchill would sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom. Or so Eleanor thought. “Won’t do,” said Winston. “Bed’s not right.” The prime minister thereupon undertook his own tour of the second floor, trying the beds and examining the storage space in each room, and finally settled on the Rose Bedroom—the same room Sara had occupied on her visits to Washington and in which Queen Elizabeth had stayed in 1939.11
Churchill confronted FDR’s butler, Alonzo Fields. “Now Fields, we want to leave here as friends, right? So I need you to listen. One, I don’t like talking outside my quarters. Two, I hate whistling in the corridors. And three, I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast, a couple of glasses of scotch and soda before lunch, and French champagne and well-aged brandy before I go to sleep at night.”12 No one in the White House had ever seen anything like Winston before, said Secret Service chief Mike Reilly. “He ate, and thoroughly enjoyed, more food than any two men or three diplomats; and he consumed brandy and scotch with a grace and enthusiasm that left us all openmouthed in awe. It was not the amount that impressed us, although that was quite impressive, but the complete sobriety that went hand and hand with his drinking.”13 When Eleanor said she feared Churchill